Friday, January 31, 2014

Learning Numbers

I came across a post from Danya Banya on number recognition which intrigued me because my 3.5 year old likes counting numbers AND jumping and this activity covered both of those things! I knew I wanted the numbers to be out of sequence so I used painters tape on our kitchen floor (too cold to go outdoors) and randomly taped squares and numbers to the floor. Tiffany can definitely recognize numbers 1-9 but 10 and up not so much. I only went up to 12 but next time I will focus more on the higher numbers.

Initially I called out a number and asked Tiffany to jump onto it. She didn't seem very interested SO I introduced bean bags and that caught her attention. We have 4 bean bags so I gave her 2 and kept 2 for me. I asked her to throw her bean bags onto a certain number and then I asked her which number I should throw mine on. This worked really well. When we first started playing Tiffany did not know numbers 10, 11 or 12. But by the end of our game...success! She called 10 a 10 an 11 an 11 and 12 a 12!!

Also by the end of the game Tiffany was ready to jump to the numbers that I called out to her!

This was a great activity that offered gross motor skills by jumping and throwing in addition to number recognition...win, win!!